The last man came out of the bathroom, and as he passed the man in the yellow shirt he ran his forefinger across his neck and mouthed the word "No."

Complete the following sentence: "Arabic terrorists, trying to keep their doings secret from other passengers, would mouth their communications in English because ___"

I am uneasy about the 'no more than two young Arab males in secondary questioning' rule, assuming it has been reported correctly, because rules like that much too easily gameable. By all means look at discouraging racial profiling, but the method needs work.

(FWIW, one reason to discourage profiling is because it's *also* too easily gameable.)
Geoffrey | Email | Homepage | 07.19.04 - 7:15 pm | #

Geoffrey, there's been no actual confirmation that it's a real rule.
Rivka | Email | Homepage | 07.19.04 - 7:28 pm | #

I read what you wrote, and on an intellectual level I don't disagree with you. And yet ... I would have been nervous, too. (And I probably would have written about it.)

-J
Jennie | Email | Homepage | 07.19.04 - 8:30 pm | #

Oh, I'm not according it the status of confirmed fact, hence the 'assuming' (and there should really have been a '...for the sake of argument' in there).

But given that a senior airline exec claimed this rule existed in front of the 9-11 Commission, and there doesn't seem to have been much rebuttal, it's possible that such a rule really did/does exist. Or that, by a process of Chinese whispers, the airlines thought such a rule existed.
Geoffrey | Email | Homepage | 07.19.04 - 8:47 pm | #

Jennie - I might have been nervous too, especially if other people on the plane were visibly nervous or upset. (This kind of reaction is, of course, contagious.)

What I find so strange is that her initial interpretation of the events changed not at all after the men were thoroughly investigated and apparently cleared of even the slightest taint of wrongdoing. (They weren't even arrested, for example, much less charged with anything.) She persists in a sinister reading of details demonstrated by the investigation to be innocuous. And she's added in embroidered details to support her version of things - for example, that the men's carry-on luggage hadn't been screened.

That's the stuff I find weird and objectionable. If you had been in that situation, and been scared, and then found out that there was a reasonable non-terrorist explanation for the things you saw, would you write this piece? Or would you write something about the unreliability of perceptions, or something?
Rivka | Email | Homepage | 07.19.04 - 9:35 pm | #

I could not bring myself to continue reading after she used "research" and "Ann Coulter" in the same sentence.
Brennan | Email | Homepage | 07.19.04 - 11:04 pm | #

That Annie Jacobsen sounds sounds awful suspicious to me. Desperately looking about the cabin. Whispering to the 20 to 50 year old man she traveling with. Staring at passengers. Passing notes to the flight crew. Very suspicious.

And why did the four year old refuse to let anyone else handle his carry-on bag?!?!?! What was he hiding???

We need to send these people off to Gitmo and make them talk. Release the dogs.
Count Asterisk | Email | Homepage | 07.19.04 - 11:19 pm | #

It definitely sounds a worrying situation.

As you say, it's weird that people don't change their mind when thwey get the evidence, but it happens a hell of a lot. Some people still think there were WMDs in Iraq.

What is perhaps most worrying is that nobody on the plane was told, in advance, "Yes, we saw these guys, we were worried, we checked them."

Doesn't anubody trust all that security?
Dave Bell | Email | Homepage | 07.20.04 - 2:43 am | #

If I were an Arab American, I would read this article and decide from now on to take the bus. Or move to Canada. Good God. What racist nonsense and the fact that she is still mad that Arabs are allowed to board aircraft in groups after being told by a bunch of intrusive and inexplicably gossipy Feds that they were all investigated and were actually a musical band. Racism. Pure and simple. Delusional racism.
Anna in Cairo | Email | Homepage | 07.20.04 - 3:14 am | #

I often need to read to pass time. I go to the library and check out 8 new-releases without vetting them very far. I figure that after reading a chapter or so, if a book is a stinker, then I always have another book to read.

However there are a few themes of books that I have learned to avoid.

One theme might be called "female lead wallows in being a victim and her incompetence" - All the problems and dangers the lead experiences are the fault of evil people, but then some man recognizes something special in her and saves her.

A related theme is "psychopaths or stalkers like to slowly tease and terrorize their targets before striking".

Put these together and you get gems like "woman clings to emotionally abusive boyfriend who refuses to believe she is being stalked by a psychopath."

While it may be possible to write competent stories with bits of these themes, most I've tried to read glory in ramping up the level of evil/terror/helplessness until the final resolution. I try to avoid such books. But there is a sizable market for where being this sort of a victim seems to be some sort of virtue.

From appreciation of such themes is how I read "Terror in the Sky".

My guess is that Annie Jacobsen came to her interpretation of events while they were happening, while she was researching, and while she was writing.

What she wrote is a piece of literature -- a fable. And it fits into the "ramping terror against a helpless female" mold. She is the only one who knows what "facts" she manipulated to make it a more gripping story.

Were her story the first part of a novel, I would quit reading it. There is so much real-world incoherence and heavy handed themes that I would guess the whole book was badly put together and would be unsatisfying.

But then again, such a work might become a NY Times bestseller. Readers might value the clear statements of feelings over the problems with specifics.
MonkeyBoy | Email | Homepage | 07.20.04 - 4:48 am | #

I am reminded that two previous lousy days at work have involved (a) a psychotic HIV-positive person bleeding on my desk from a self-inflicted wound, and (b) an erect penis I very much did not want to see.

Boy, and I thought I worked at a lousy Starbucks.
alkali | Email | Homepage | 07.20.04 - 8:53 am | #

You don't need to be Arab for this kind of thing to happen. All you need is for someone to think you might be Arab.

My husband and I were in the Pasadena airport, waiting for our flight home. There are way too few seats there so we were on the floor reading. When it finally came time to board, two police officers approached my husband. Someone had complained that he was "kneeling and praying."

I didn't realize that was a crime in Pasadena, but even if it were, he was doing neither of those two things. He was kind of lying on the floor reading a book on Tolkien. They never said the word "Muslim," but obviously that's what someone assumed he was (and therefore automatically a terrorist). He happens to be a Jew whose lineage obviously goes all the way back because he looks very Middle Eastern. The police had the good sense to look embarrassed, questioning him about such behavior. Still, we were flabbergasted that it even occurred.
Berni | Email | Homepage | 07.20.04 - 10:33 am | #

Thanks for the link, Rivka. That story was amazing just for its sheer bigotry. What gets me is that some people expect to be allowed to pray when and where they please without incident if they are Christian but let a Muslim pray in public and the Annie Jacobsons of the world would think they're planning terrorist plots. It's so clear from her article that Arabs board planes only to blow them up. :/

Speaking of airline scares, there was another one at BWI involving what turned out to be a woman with a stomach flu. The commenters at Little Green Footballs of course went Fox Mulder on everyone and came up with all sorts of conspiracy theories. No, it wasn't bio-warfare or the crew practicing knocking out passengers in case terrorists hijack a plane. It's not as offensive as Annie's story but a lot of people were scared. Here's the URL to my post about it and a link to the original article:

http://trishwilson.typepad.com/ b...ncidents_o.html
Trish Wilson | Email | Homepage | 07.20.04 - 12:56 pm | #

I'd like to see a study done on the correlation between barely conceeled racism/ succeptibility to fearmongering and support for the GOP. I'd bet money on the order of tripple digits that there'd be a remarkably high relationship between the two.
Keith | Email | Homepage | 07.20.04 - 4:28 pm | #

A lot of the fear comes, I think, paradoxically from the security theater (Bruce Schneier's useful phrase) surrounding air travel these days. The searches and x-raying and shoe-removal and so on are meant to reassure us. But the reaction of a certain kind of person is to confirm her in the certainty that she is taking her life in her hands by getting on the plane. LAX is one of the worst US airports for security theater; LAX is Ms. Jacobsen's home airport. Once in a mindset, one interprets events to conform.

I cannot blame Ms. Jacobsen for this. She reads and believes Ann Coulter. Belief that terrorists are on her plane is much saner.

I do blame the people who picked her account up. They must have known this was nonsense. But it supports their agenda.
jam | Email | Homepage | 07.20.04 - 7:56 pm | #

Yes, it's understandable that someone might get worried, especially someone with a lively imagination, but I don't understand why that someone would write the story up and have it published. In fact, it's in the publishing bit that the real mystery lies. Why on earth publish something like this? I have lots of stories which are quite similar, like the time when I thought I was being stalked on a foggy night, but it turns that the footsteps behind me were my neighbor coming home. Maybe I should write it up now?
Echidne | Email | Homepage | 07.21.04 - 12:00 am | #

Why on earth publish something like this?

Because fear sells.
Geoffrey | Email | Homepage | 07.21.04 - 12:37 am | #

I still don't understand why the stewardess couldn't have gone to the galley or the john to write 'dark man in yellow shirt.' No short-term memory, so she would have had to sit in front of him and look up a lot while writing? Was she pulling the hapless writer's leg? Was she even real or was she out of a half-remembered Movie of the Week?

I could understand keeping the paranoid tone of her original musings in if she was going to surprise us all with the fact that they were innocent musicians, and I guess we're all just a little paranoid after 9/11.

What gets me is that she goes all the way through that and still thinks it was suspicious. If that's her way of thinking, she should probably just skedaddle home and not stop running until the gate locks behind her.
Kip W | Email | Homepage | 07.21.04 - 10:06 am | #

Pour that woman a drink of Pelligrino. (It's got lithium in it.) She probably thinks her children have been abducted by child molesters every time they're not where she expects them to be. (I got an earfull of that from another mother the other day.) Some people just need to calm down.
Kathryn Cramer | Email | Homepage | 07.21.04 - 10:55 am | #

"About 20 minutes later the same flight attendant returned. Leaning over and whispering, she asked my husband to write a description of the yellow-shirted man sitting across from us. She explained it would look too suspicious if she wrote the information. She asked my husband to slip the note to her when he was done."


I think the flight attendant is saying "I can't write up this incident myself, because I'll look like a paranoid racist, but if you nutjobs write it up, I'll be glad to pass it on."

It would look too suspicious to her terrorist-loving, PC, commie bosses, not to al Qaeda agent Trombone Yellowshirt.
Count Asterisk | Email | Homepage | 07.21.04 - 3:32 pm | #

I cannot find the response I made to this story in another blog, but essentially what I said there was that I see lingering aftereffects of this sort of reaction from nearly 60 years ago -- Japanese Americans stopped congregating in ethnic groupings as much as they had pre-war, because they'd learned that any large group of Nisei looked suspicious to "Americans".

I want my country back from the hands of those who swallow the sorts of paranoid lies that lead to this atmosphere.
Trinker | Email | Homepage | 07.21.04 - 4:48 pm | #

sigh.

My neighborhood is populated by a large group of south asians and afghanis, and the local businesses put women behind the cash registers after 9/11 because the normal cultural responses of the men (not automatically smiling at strangers, not making small talk, not (in the case I suppose of people of conservative religious beliefs) putting money in womens' hands) were interpreted through the new paranoia as hostility or suspicious behavior.

The women who work the front of the store now, many in traditional dress, seem to set off a lot less assholish behaviors from customers who think they're 'responding' to provocation from people who are simply trying to support their families selling milk and beer to people who don't get out to shop while the supermarket is open.

Yeah, the guys were syrian. They didn't smile at her, although even assuming she wasn't behaving like a whackaloon yet at that point - something I question, given her husband's description of wanting to get off the flight before they even boarded - in some cultures men don't interact socially with women who are not their wives.

Even so, once they got to be used to me (and realized my daughter was going to school with their kids) people have been surprisingly friendly.

I think Ms. Jacobsen might be amazed how far a little respectful behavior and the sweet balm of minding your own fucking business will take you with people from cultures different than your own.

Who knows? Maybe syrian musicians are just creeped out by neuraesthenic preppies.
julia | Email | Homepage | 07.21.04 - 6:30 pm | #

1. Clueless me, I would probably ask about the musical instruments, particularly if cases were odd-shaped (oh, so that's what an oud looks like).

2. On a packed train, with the seat next to me the last available one, a bearded, sandaled, shawla kamiz'ed young Pakistani man sat down. I had the feeling that he was probably more afraid of this infidel woman in a loose but still short-sleeved shirt than I was of him. Rather like sitting next to a bashful cloistered monk.
NancyP | Email | Homepage | 07.21.04 - 7:49 pm | #

Of course she had to tell the world about it all--the world revolves around her, after all.

Most of us, if we felt compelled to write about it/talk about it afterwards, would be inclined to either minimize our own reactions, or comment on how silly we felt for overreacting so badly. However, if you have neither a sense of proportion, nor a sense of humor where your own follies are concerned, it's easy to find yourself on your full-tilt boogie ride to Extremely Public Foolishness.

As for the Republicans and racism, I can only say: Trent Lott. [Insert other name as desired.] The fearmongering is very similar to all the Blacks as Other, as Other [hey, remember the Know-nothings?] tropes from our past. The same exercises are being played out today, and if you never leave your upper-middle class white cocoon to find out more about people who aren't Just Like You, you're going to be vulnerable to every last one of them.
fidelio | Email | Homepage | 07.22.04 - 10:23 am | #

And so it continues: http://www.washingtontimes.com/f...21-101403- 1508r

The same story with a more serious tone.
Berni | Email | Homepage | 07.22.04 - 10:34 am | #

I saw this woman interviewed live on CNN, and she was namedropping like crazy about air marshals and saying something like "Now they know" (of course it's always a They) "how far they can get without being arrested -- these men weren't arrested" (because they hadn't done anything) "they know they can go up to the cockpit, go to the restrooms, stand around in groups....these are dry runs. And the air marshals told me that these dry runs are taking place, here and now, all over the US." (Paraphrasing slightly here -- I'm sure that's not word-for-word but I was so shocked by what she said I'm sure it's reasonably close, especially the "dry runs" part.)

If 19 terrorists can learn to fly airplanes into buildings, couldn't 14 terrorists learn to play instruments?

She also repeated this on CNN. Meaning absolutely no disrespect to any pilots in the audience, but my understanding is that the 19 hijackers had the most rudimentary of flight skills (didn't one of them say he didn't need to learn how to take off and land? or is that urban legend?). From what I understand of the 19 terrorists, they were absolutely ruthlessly dedicated, but playing a musical instrument professionally enough to get invited to a gig -- which checked out later -- is not something you can pick up in, say, a couple of months. And the idea of roping some musicians into a terrorist cause so they can supposedly hijack a plane while they're on their way to a gig....having grown up with musicians, I know they're usually devoted to, well, music. And they're also rather unpredictable, except when it comes to, well, music....

Also, now that we've all seen that infamous videotape of some of the hijackers being passed through airport security, they were trying NOT TO LOOK OBVIOUS, remember? Short hair, no facial hair that I could see, Western dress....I would imagine the last thing terrorists would want to do is ATTRACT somebody's attention on a plane.

Maybe part of the reason the men were acting "suspicious" and not smiling was that they were aware she was constantly watching them and talking to other people about them, and they thought something like, "Oh, shit"? I mean, I wouldn't smile at someone who was gawking at me for a whole plane ride, either.
M o I | Email | Homepage | 07.23.04 - 1:12 pm | #

There's a news article at http://www.kfi640.com/ericleonard.html currently with the headline "AIR MARSHALS SAY PASSENGER OVERREACTED".

The article quotes "a federal law enforcement source":

The source said the air marshals on the flight were partially concerned Jacobsen’s actions could have been an effort by terrorists or attackers to create a disturbance on the plane to force the agents to identify themselves.

Air marshals’ only tactical advantage on a flight is their anonymity, the source said, and Jacobsen could have put the entire flight in danger.

Then the article quotes Air Marshals spokesman Dave Adams: "They have to be very cognizant of their surroundings to make sure it isn’t a ruse to try and pull them out of their cover."

In short, Ms. Jacobsen was as much part of the problem as the musicians were, from the Marshals' viewpoint.
Jeremy Leader | Email | Homepage | 07.23.04 - 8:02 pm | #

oh jeremy, reading your comment was better than christmas. thank you.

"In short, Ms. Jacobsen was as much part of the problem as the musicians were, from the Marshals' viewpoint".

i love it. over-reacting, self-righteous ann coulter-fan threatens national security via her own racist delusions. wow.
A N N A | Email | Homepage | 07.29.04 - 8:15 am | #

quicken loan quicken loan quicken loan. bailout loan savings bailout loan savings bailout loan savings.
clymxwr | Email | Homepage | 08.28.07 - 3:00 am | #